Grounding

Feeling psychologically stressed truly impacts your body's health over time. As part of a larger plan to boost your resiliency that includes routine exercising, sleeping well and eating lots of fresh, unprocessed foods, taking a grounding vacation can reset your body. Whether it is laying on a beach, swimming in a lake, napping poolside, yoga in a meadow or hiking in the mountains, taking a vacation (or a long weekend) centered around grounding daily might be one of the best ways to hit a reset button in your life. Almost every vacation destination has evolved to be a vacation spot because of how good it feels to be grounded, even though most people don't realize grounding is why: beaches, lakeside resorts, camp grounds, in ground pools in hotels … it's all grounded and it all feels amazing. While you relax connected to the global electrical circuit of the earth, grounding is at work decreasing cortisol, decreasing whole body inflammation, and significantly boosting mood — all perfect to decrease stress levels and restore your naturally energetic, creative and optimistic inner child.

As a physician, it's becoming incredibly obvious that digestive issues of all kinds, from inflammatory bowel diseases to food sensitivities and food intolerances, are on the rise. Steeply. In addition to the food allergy testing, blood tests and bowel imaging studies that your physician may want to do as part of your work up, and in complement to the dietary changes, medications and lifestyle interventions your physician may suggest as a treatment plan, I encourage you to eat at least one meal every day grounded outside. Grounding decreases inflammation throughout your entire body, and your gut lining is no exception. Decreasing the inflammatory response of the gut by grounding while you are eating is a great way to allow your food to digest more easily and with less discomfort, and secondarily because grounding increases blood flow as well, your gut absorption will be enhanced too. In addition, vagal tone gets a boost when the body is grounded, and this in turn is a direct avenue for grounding to impact digestion, as our entire digestive tract is driven by the vagus nerve, everything from our salivary glands to our swallowing mechanism to gut peristalsis and even digestive enzyme secretion is guided by vagus nerve function. On top of all of this, walking boosts gut motility, so consider taking 10 min to walk grounded after a meal to help boost gut peristalsis naturally, which will encourage healthy bowel movements and decrease bloating, indigestion and constipation.

If you find you have trouble sleeping at night, one of the best things you can do is to make a daily habit out of grounding in the morning light. Grounding to the earth directly helps re-sync your circadian rhythm to the planet via the global electrical circuit. And as we know from the medical literature, this helps calm brain waves, deepen sleep, boosts sleep quality, normalize cortisol and makes the sleep you do get (even if it is not as long as you would hope) more restorative. Get up with the sunrise and go outside for 20 min of grounding during the AM hours where you live. Do this daily and you will notice your sleep naturally improving at night. The best part about grounding in the morning as an adjunctive treatment for insomnia is that it works in concert with any conventional medical treatment your physician might suggest, and can complement everything from a sleep study work up, to correcting sleep apnea with a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine, to sleep-inducing supplements and medications.

Because grounding goes immediately to work directly stabilizing your autonomic nervous system by boosting your vagal tone, it has the power to regulate your racing heart and deepen your breathing. So, it's literally the perfect adjunctive support during panic attacks and heightened anxiety states. Along with conventional evaluation and treatment that might include therapy, medication, exercise and mind-body work, grounding is an instantly accessible healing tool that can provide immediate support during increased periods of anxiety no matter where you are or what you are doing. If you feel a panic attack approaching, stop everything and touch the earth. Pull over if you are driving, go outside if you are home or at work or in a crowded shop or restaurant and let the stability of the earth ease your panic and calm your anxiety with its power.

Grounding is a wonderfully uplifting way to balance mood, support the central nervous system, and release chronic inflammation that puts wear and tear on the body and mind. Ongoing research is revealing the full extent that inflammation plays in depression, as higher levels of blood markers of inflammation have been found to be directly correlated with a variety of depressive symptoms, including sleep difficulty, decreased energy levels, decreased motivation and increased or decreased appetite. Another study found that anti-inflammatory drugs helped to lessen depressive symptoms and resolve depressive episodes better than anti-depressants alone when added to anti-depressant therapy. Grounding is not only anti-inflammatory and stabilizing, it boosts mood and energy levels as well, and can work in conjunction with any therapy, medication or treatment for depression that your physician may suggest. The best approach to adding grounding to a treatment for depression is to get into a daily routine so that benefits are cumulative over time, instead of sporadic support. So, choose hobbies that get you outside routinely: gardening is perfect, whether it is flowers or herbs or vegetables that will get you outside daily, nurturing something growing on this earth will have you grounding daily by default. Other ideas include bird watching, nature photography, stretching or journaling outside, or simply listening to a podcast or music … headphones on and bare feet in the grass.

Back pain is one of the most common reasons people see a doctor. And the good news is, no matter what treatment plan your physician recommends, from imaging studies to physical therapy to surgery to medications, grounding can expedite your recovery and decrease pain from injury and inflammation in your spine. Consider the earth your very own physical therapist, as you lay grounding directly on the earth outside. We know that routine grounding decreases pain and decreases whole body inflammation, and that includes inflammation and pain in your ligaments and tendons. Your entire spine is conductive, the discs and ligaments and vertebral bones that make up your spine are conductive, and all of your joints and the fluid in your joints are conductive. Grounding spinal care can be as simple as laying on the earth outside with an ice pack or a hot water bottle held to tight areas, or you can add some gentle twists, stretches and release exercises or any physical therapy and rehabilitative exercises you've been instructed to do. Make this time exponentially more powerful then stretching or doing rehab exercises indoors by adding grounding to the therapy session. Even if all you do is go stretch on the earth outside while you wait for your pain medication to take effect, you will be supporting repair to your body's skeletal system on a much deeper level than just treating pain with a pill. Grounding decreases inflammation in the body over the long term, but you don't have to wait to have back pain to begin to support your body's longevity, but if you do already have back issues, grounding is one healing therapy you will want to add to your already established medical treatment plan.

Meditation has been medically proven repeatedly in the medical literature to reduce post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms as well as, or better than, traditional therapeutic approaches including talk therapy and exposure therapy. Even a super quick and easy meditation technique like mantra repetition out performed talk therapy in reducing PTSD symptoms, even hard-to-treat symptoms such as insomnia. So, if you struggle with prolonged meditation, simply taking a few minutes to repeat a positive word or phrase with mindfulness can reap huge benefits in trauma recovery. And to get exponential benefits, combine mantra and meditation with grounding outside. It can be as simple as sitting outside on the earth and focusing on your breath. Connecting to our global electrical circuit through grounding deepens sleep, decreases stress hormones and boosts vagal tone, all of which can provide incredible relief and boost resiliency in the face of trauma.

Take weight off of your area of injury to allow it to recover by removing the force of gravity from your joints, allowing healing that can be more gentle while at the same time be more effective. Water is perfectly suited to helping you heal not just because it buffers the force of gravity from your skeletal system but because almost all pools and certainly all natural bodies of water are grounded. In ground pools that are made from concrete or cement are all grounded, so most pools in hotels and gyms and neighborhoods and private back yards, as long as they are not lined with plastic or made from plastic, provide therapeutic grounding support to your body while you work on building strength, recovering mobility and increasing range of motion in the water. We know that grounding not only decreases inflammation and pain, but during exertion it decreases damage done to muscles and mitigates how much soreness you experience later. Which means you can participate more fully in your water-based recovery plan, without worrying about being as sore or in pain later. This will allow you to be more invested in your healing sessions and see results faster, all while the grounded water is allowing supported movement and decreases the gravitational load on your joints.